Tag: beating procrastination

Do you think that your ability to self discipline yourself is always up to just you? Maybe it is, but the results of following experiment may surprise you.

Researches from University of Southern California university did a following experiment. They took a big group of people to the cinema and gave them two types of popcorn. One came in huge pot, more than you can eat, but it was fresh. The other one set was even bigger, more than you can ever eat, and on top of that the popcorn was stale. Half of people randomly received the first bag and other half the second one. After the movie was over, not surprisingly, no one ate all the popcorn. And if it wasn’t free some people would definitely demand their money back.

But one very interesting thing happened. The people who received the bigger bag ate 50% more of the popcorn on average than people who received the small one! The conclusion we can take from that is that you are not totally in control of your actions but your environment plays a big role. Of course people would not admit that. After the experiment people were asked if the size of their bag could possibly influence how much they ate. Everybody denied saying they know what they are doing and slammed off such suggestions as ridiculous.

Popcorn

Now that we know environment has a big effect on us, should we cry and whine about it and blame it for our failures? Some sure do that, but actually we should get excited about it. If things in our environment have such a big effect on us, that means we can set up our environment in a way that will bring success! Our willpower might be limited but while we have it we can use it to set up the path and if we did it smart enough we should then continue almost on auto pilot.
For example. Lets say you wanted to start eating healthier and lose some weight. You might be successful with sticking to a diet for some days then you will slowly fall back to your old ways. Why does this happen? You exhausted your self discipline and your environment makes it easy to start eating unhealthy again. For example, you come to the kitchen, open the cabinet and see a bar of chocolate there. You say to yourself “I already had a salad 2 days ago” and eat the chocolate bar. And next thing you know, you have eat a whole pack of them.

Fridge full of beer - maybe not the best way to set up your environment if you want to drink less

But how can you set up your environment to succeed in this example? Few suggestions:

Toss all your unhealthy food away.

Go to store and buy some healthy food.

Prepare your meals in advance for the whole week and put them in the fridge.

Now when you come to the fridge you wont have anything else to choose from but your healthy meals. And you only need to use the self discipline once a week to prepare the meals. Self discipline may be limited so use it wisely. You might set up emails every week in addition to really strengthen the new behavior. Use whatever you can in your environment to set yourself up for success. Use your self discipline in small bursts to set up the environment and your chances of success will skyrocket.

Self discipline is basically a collection of good habits, that we stick to on a regular basis. One way improve it is to gradually create a new habits that improve our life for the better. The problem with habits is that you can’t create them overnight. According to research, it takes about 3 weeks or 21 days to create a new lasting habit. It’s easy to do something new for a couple of days, but can you stick to it for 3 weeks?

This is where HabitForge.com comes it. Its a very simple site that allows you create new habits by sending you reminders after each day, asking you about your progress. After you sign up you can start creating new habit right away with a very simple process. First you have to choose a new habit. Let’s say you’re are not eating breakfast and you want to improve your eating habits by having a healthy breakfast every day. When you create a new habit at habitforge you have to complete the following question that you will be asked every day: Were you successful yesterday at___________________. So in our case that would be “Were you successful yesterday at having a healthy breakfast”. And that’s all there is to it! You are done and after the day is over, you will be sent that question to your email address and can answer either Yes or No. If you answer Yes you had a successful day, but if you answer No, then you have to start all over again! The habit is only considered created after you do it for 21 consecutive days. If you manage 20 days but fail the last day you will have to start all over again, so that will give you extra motivation to really stick to it!

Habitforge also offers additional options for advanced users. You can write some personal motivation details when creating a habit. That includes what are the negative and positive consequences for creating this habit. You will be reminded of that in your daily emails. You can also create a public link that will enable your friends to see the habit that you are creating. That will create some peer pressure to further enable you to create a new habit successfully and improve. Another option is to choose just some days of the week in which you will monition success, as with some habits not all days might be relevant. For example you decide to start exercising 4 days per week.

Try HabitForge.com today. It’s totally free and worth giving a shot if it can potentially create new positive habits for your life and improve self discipline.

Sometimes little changes can have big impact on your life. In today’s article I will present you 3 simple techniques that will improve your self discipline. Those 3 are:

10 Minute rule

3 Magic questions

Ultimate goal VS immediate desire

10 Minute rule
The basic idea is: If you have to complete some task decide that you will work on it just for 10 minutes to see how it goes. You can stop or continue after that, but you will commit yourself to the task for 10 minutes. After the 10 minutes have passed you will usually find out that you actually want to keep working on the task. You will notice you are already producing results and the law of inertia will keep you going. Once you get started its easy to keep going.
For procrastinator the hardest part is to get started on the task and the “10 minute rule” will help you vastly with that. You won’t be overwhelmed with the enormous task on your plate anymore, you only have to work on it for 10 minutes. Sometimes that might even be enough to get the whole thing done! People who procrastinate can sometimes spend five hours to procrastinate on a task and in the end it turns out it only takes 10 minutes to complete it.
The 10 minute rule will help you get started and usually you’ll find out that you are still working on the task when the initial 10 minutes have elapsed. According to studies it takes about 10 minutes to get absorbed in the task you are doing. What if you stop after 10 minutes? That’s fine, you completed the first part now you can move to another. Take another 10 minutes and see what you can do now! Rome was not built in one day. You can only eat an elephant one bite at the time. Consider 10 minutes as one bite and slowly you will get even the biggest, most overwhelming task (your elephant) done that way.

Stopwatch

3 Magic questions
The second technique to improve your self discipline is called “3 magic questions”. Every time you catch yourself procrastinating ask yourself these 3 questions:

Where am I now and what am I doing?

What do I want to do?

How will I feel when I do it?

The point of this exercise is to change your focus from your current distraction to the task you want to get done. And one way to change your focus is to ask yourself the right questions.
With first question you will become aware what you are doing right now, that you are procrastinating, not getting anything done and you will feel bad about yourself.
Example: Where am I now and what am I doing?I’m behind my computer surfing the web, looking at lolcats funny pictures.

Next you will focus on what you want to get done. Think about every detail, get yourself into the state of doing it.
Example: What do I want to do? I want to finish writing new article on my blog and publish it.

With the last question think about all the positive results you will get from accomplishing your tasks. They might not be immediate, but make them seem like you already have them. See what you will see when you get it done, and try feel physically in your body as if you would already finish your task.
Example: How will I feel when I do it? I will feel great, i will get the job done and get the valuable information I’m putting to this article to my readers.

Ultimate goal VS immediate desire
When we procrastinate we are usually in inner conflict between the ultimate goal that we want to achieve by completing our task and the immediate desire that we can get right now. For example, you want to exercise, but you are procrastinating to get to the gym. The ultimate goal is to lose 10 pounds. The immediate desire is to watch youtube videos and browse facebook while eating a cupcake. What you have to do here is to switch your immediate desire with ultimate goal. You have to make your ultimate goal your immediate desire. You do that by changing your focus to the positive results you will get by completing your task. They might not be instant but you have to ask yourself: “At this point would I rather be slim, fit and healthy or would I rather see another funny video on youtube?” This way you make your ultimate goal more real. Ask more questions about how completing your goal will positively affect your life and you will get more and more compelled to do it now. Make your ultimate goal seem like instant gratification.

These 3 simple techniques will greatly improve your self discipline. Try it next time you catch yourself procrastinating!